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Just to say hi, in the quality of a recent buyer of Tinderbox (not so recent "user", since I tried this 2 years ago... then quit... then last year... quit... but now this is it).So I'm planning to use Tinderbox to collect statements from several authors and to create a database of urban plans and their "quantitative" characteristics.I hope Tinderbox helps me make a sense of this messy world.

Yes. A lot of literature research + 10 to 15 interviews (I hope) + analysis of urban plans (designs and regulations) ...A lot to do, not too much time left, so I have the sense of needing to do things right away, still without knowing for sure what will be more or less relevant. I needed something that let me start right away but with enough flexibility to change things later.TBX seems perfect between Devonthink and Scrivener, which I use as well. I have also Aeon Timeline license but I guess TBX's one is more flexible as well for this stage of research.

Last year, I had to reread every interview I had made in the last three years for my thesis. There were 6 interviews with teachers and a lot of words to analyze and I couldn't have a pure quantitative approach (for instance, analyzing the frequency of a particular word within a corpus). Indeed, in this case, several solutions would have been possible with Tinderbox and I've already tried one which consisted in coloring some datas in relation to some specific predetermined tags. I had to visualize (and not only read) the different topics I could identify and their mutual relations too. For this purpose, I used Tinderbox in the following way : I read every interview and put into my TBX file every relevant topic (for instance, feelings, reasonings, images and so on... but what is a relevant topic in a clinical approach ?), organizing them into a map with Map View. In this way, I could systematically linked every word I found relevant for my problematic to other significant and similar words or topics. In fact, I made a sort of cartography of a speech and I must say it was very handy to use since later on I had to switch from my interview to its analysis and Map View was in this case very handy in order to identify swiftly the pieces of sentences I had in mind. I can't yet post some pictures of those maps since I didn't finished that thesis. But I think someday I'll have to write something on it.

"cartography of a speech" seems really a nice way to put it (but I'm an architect, so cartography has a familiar meaning to me); so you placed "topics" in the Map View and linked "interviews" text to them (using text links, i.e. text link parking space above the "text" panel (right side of tinderbox interface) ?Did you find any way to automate the process or was it manual?thanks, and hope someday to see those images

I have come late to this party so these questions and suggestions will not be much help to Dominique, since I am sure she is well past that stage.

This is not intended to undermine what remarkable things one might do with Tinderbox. But I have to ask - for what you were doing, would it not have been much easier to use qualitative data analysis software like Atlas ti? It pretty much does all of what you were suggesting and would be much quicker and more powerful to coding your themes and phrases. Now, it is not the cheapest software in the world.

Another option is NVivo (although personally I find their GUI design to be very non-standard and hard to recommend) but it is software that is available on site licence at many academic institutions.

Atlas/ti and NVivo are terrific for qualitative data analysis, provided you're confident that your coding system will not need to change. In my experience, that's common in two cases: small projects like MA theses and short-term contract work where there's simply no time to change, and routine projects where either (a) the investigators have so much experience in previous studies that changes are unlikely, or (b) the scale of the investigation requires an army of coding personnel, who can at most be trained once.

Tinderbox is optimized for exploratory coding, in which what we discover in the process of beginning a study can reshape the study itself. In anecdotal terms, Tinderbox is a response to that most familiar of CAQDAS complaints: "our results would be clearer and more significant if only we knew at the outset what we know now."